She doesn’t react. So I take a look at the Tupperware offer. If I buy a really big container, I save eighty-five per cent!
‘Hey Kieran,’ I say, ‘that’s nonsense.’
Now Kieran looks at the offer.
‘Don’t you get the food inside as well?’
‘No, I don’t think so.’
‘Huh? What do you mean “I don’t think so”?’ Bea has caught me out.
I take a deep breath.
‘Okay. I meant to say: “No, of course not! It’s a trick. Tupperware looks boring without food inside, and it’s supposed to whet your appetite so that you shop more at Lidl, and collect points and feel like you’re saving money. Even though you never wanted the Tupperware to begin with. Why would you if you don’t even have the food for it? So, of course, they add it to the photo, and it’s the same as flying abroad for the autumn holidays. They don’t come with serving suggestions and whoever says differently is lying!”’
I grin at Bea. It’s great being so educated.
‘If we don’t go away, I’ll do schoolwork instead,’ says Bea. ‘At least then I’ll be ahead of the others in some way.’
She storms out of the room.
It’s not nice being this educated. Bea is at the top of her class even though she skipped a year: she can’t help it, and suffers from always being right, always being the best.
Her room is also the nicest in the flat. She made it that way, dyeing a bed cover with batik, doing up an old desk, and finding decorating ideas on the internet. Apart from that, she cleans it every week and tidies up every day. She’s also the only one who makes her bed.
Now she’s sitting at her desk, staring at the shelf on which her files are sorted by colour.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say.
Next door in his room, Jack yells at the computer. ‘Shit! I died, you spaz!’ and Bea raises her eyebrows.
I rush over and tell Jack I’m going to take away his computer if the game makes him so aggressive.
When I come back, Bea is sitting there just the same way.
‘I wish I didn’t care,’ she says.
‘About what?’
‘Everything. What we do. The way things look. Who thinks what, who travels where.’
‘I’m sorry.’
I’m helpless. I want to tell her everything, prepare her, explain the facts of life, and give her the right tools. But I haven’t got the faintest clue how to help her not care.
‘Will you come with me to pick up Lynn?’
‘Okay,’ says Bea, and stands up.
There’s more yelling from next door. I look into the boys’ room again.
‘Half an hour,’ I say to Jack and Kieran. ‘And no yelling and no rude words.’
I’m such a twat. Who’s supposed to enforce that rule?
Apart from anything, ‘twat’ is rude too.
The childcare centre is hidden in bleak drizzle. The rangy poplars that are supposed to screen the empty lot of the neighbouring building are bare; a plastic bag is tangled in the upper branches.
I carefully slide the child safety lock over the gate. Not once in the past twelve years have I forgotten to do it. Not a single child has been able to slip through the gate and endanger themselves due to my negligence.
‘Why are you grinning?’ Bea asks.
‘Because I’m such a twat — oops, that’s the second time today. You can’t say “twat”.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because it’s an offensive word for women’s genitals.’
Lynn’s group room is empty: the late shift has started. I prefer picking up Lynn from the garden because then I can imagine she’s free — freer at least than the leftover children in the late-shift room lit by neon strips, overseen by whoever happens to be on duty that week.
I confess this to Bea, who shakes her head. ‘I always preferred the late-shift room to the garden.’
‘But with you, I almost always managed to be on time!’
‘Yeah, that was really annoying. The late shift was nice and cosy.’
Another nine months of childcare. Next year, Lynn starts school and then this chapter will be over. Then I’ll have slid the safety catch over the gate for fourteen years—
I was less anxious with Lynn than with Bea from the start — or I’d already got used to being anxious. When Lynn was born, Bea had already been at school for two years, and was almost as old as Marianne when the girls gave her the cold shoulder—
Bea hasn’t been given the cold shoulder, at least not as far as I know. But I didn’t realise either that she liked the late-shift room.
‘Have your classmates ever ganged up on you? Have your friends ever stopped talking to you or anything like that?’
We are walking down the corridor that displays the centre’s mission statement in quotes by great thinkers on the wall. Copied, and hung with Ikea frames: ‘The limits of my language are the limits of my world.’
‘I don’t have any friends.’
I don’t want Bea to say that. Back when she used to go to childcare, I asked her why she didn’t get herself a friend — to shore herself up against loneliness, the late shift, and the enforced post-lunch nap; as a compensation for being weaned off her dummy, for the disgusting food and the ban on thumb-sucking. And then I thought she was probably better off without, because having a friend would mean being dependent. The mother of her friend would have probably always arrived punctually before four o’clock, and Bea would have felt twice as abandoned in the late-shift room on the few occasions I had not made it on time. Better not to be a target, better to be independent and practiced in loneliness—
As far as I know, Lynn doesn’t have a friend either. But I don’t worry about her.
I watch her putting on her jacket. Wrapping her scarf around her neck, slipping on her gloves.
‘Whew, it’s hot in here,’ says Bea. ‘I’ll wait outside.’
Lynn doesn’t just take her time. She almost grinds to a halt, says Bea. I don’t mind in Lynn’s
